Totally not a pseudonym. Twitter performance of a fictional poet. Was once a sophist. Effective Enmity. Sociohistorically jewish; otherwise whateverbeing. 🐦🔥
Joined February 2021
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Rather than responding to this condescending diatribe, let us instead venture the question: what does Pete Wolfendale get from postulating a separation between Deleuze and Derrida? Our guess is Hegel.
Okay, one last time then: if you were to pick one single thing that differentiates Deleuze and Derrida, a good choice would be that one is very explicitly a metaphysician and the other is very explicitly an anti-metaphysician. However, this fundamental fact about Deleuze was largely obscured for anglophone readers who came to him by reading, e.g., Anti-Oedipus in the 80s/90s. This is partly due to the ‘concepts as tools’ approach he and Guattari advertised in C&S, and partly due to him being categorised in a manner that overemphasised similarities with Derrida.
When I say that Deleuze is a structuralist it is because his inversion of Platonism consists in understanding Ideas in structural terms, specifically as Riemannian manifolds determined by differential relations between quantitative and qualitative variables, re-articulating the relation between space and time in a way that owes more to Leibniz than Husserl. He explicitly wants this to cover not just dynamic systems in physics, but also to fold in the sorts of structural analyses carried out by Levi-Strauss and Althusser (see D&R ch. 4/5).
This proliferation of structure is nothing like Derrida’s decentring of structure, and Deleuze’s prioritisation of difference over identity via differential calculus is nothing like Derrida’s play of differance. For Deleuze, signs/events get their sense from Ideas/attractors, and are not principally linguistic, while for Derrida signs get their sense from (open-ended) chains of other signs, and are principally linguistic. They are both writing in the wake of the academic high point structuralism, but they are doing very different things with its ideas.
These projects can look superficially similar if you read Deleuze (and others, such as Foucault) through Derrida, and I think this has been a real tendency in anglophone humanities departments since they started importing French theory in the 80s. If you open up an introductory text on theory in a subject like geography or film studies you will find a summary of what ‘poststructuralism’ is that melds these thinkers together in a way that does neither Deleuze nor his relation to structuralism justice.
It allows him to preserve Deleuze as a philosophical source for a project committed to intelligible metaphysical structures, mathematical modeling, and rational explanation, while excluding Derrida from that reconstruction by classifying him as an anti-metaphysical thinker.
Oh look, an insufferable troglodite using a math result to post about...*checks notes* their own paper. Ask your doctor if Epistemia is right for you.
It’s getting surreal.
A mathematician on X announced a solution to one of the most beautiful and elegant problems in mathematics. I’ll keep him anonymous. You’ll see why in a moment.
Is ℤ Diophantine in ℚ? In other words, can a single polynomial equation pick out exactly the integers among the rational numbers?
Equations like these go back to the ancient Greeks. This particular question has been open for decades. There are good reasons to expect the answer to be no. Surprisingly, the proposed answer is yes.
So, what’s the problem?
The problem is that the author candidly says in the post “I don’t have the expertise to understand this solution”, but he posts it anyway as he has “high confidence” on it.
The proof doesn’t even have the formal Lean verification.
This is literally an AI generated proof that looks plausible, but nobody has actually verified.
This is exactly what we call Epistemia. The argument looks plausible, and plausibility takes the place of verification.
Until recently, a mathematician would be embarrassed to announce a proof he couldn’t understand.
Now it risks becoming the norm.
I think this is partly due to short term incentives.
Announcements like this get you thousands of followers and interviews with journalists. (Now you know why I’m keeping him anonymous.)
Epistemia is already a big issue.
It’s a tragedy that short-term incentives - Andy Warhol’s 15 minutes of fame - are pushing people to become even more sick.
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In the first comment, you’ll find our epistemological fault lines paper, where we discuss Epistemia at length. I think it’s useful to understand what’s happening.
Mathematicians, you have officially generated sufficient bitterness in someone to cause them to learn something new out of spite. Good work.
James Jouissance retweeted
A philosophy which emphasizes the idea of the One is generally a dualistic philosophy in which the conception of Second receives exaggerated attention; for this One (though of course involving the idea of First) is always the other of a manifold which is not one.
James Jouissance retweeted
My previous post started to stir up AI hype, which was not the intention, so I deleted it. Suffice it to say that the world is changing fast, and people should be preparing carefully and thoughtfully.
Regarding mathematics specifically, it has been a cornerstone of human intellectual flourishing, and I certainly wish for that to continue. I hope there will be spaces for exploring mathematics in new ways, but also spaces for preserving the old artisanal ways, and that people think about how to sustain such environments.
James Jouissance retweeted
Hegel first advocated realism; and Hegel unfortunately was about at the average degree of German correctness in logic.
